January 24, 2015

ISIS Murdered Haruna Yukawa

I'm looking this over at the moment. Anyway there was a delay in the release and Kenji Goto Jogo it appears is still alive.

click for larger

At first glance it appears the new video is a hasty release, without the high production value in the previous video. It is a simple audio message over a the above still image.

Our thoughts go out to the People of Japan and to the family of Haruna Yukawa.

Update: In the video, in which Jihadi John is conspicuously absent Kenji Goto Jogo in English says the captors demands have changed. The demand for ransom is dropped and that Mr. Goto will be traded for a single female captive help by the Jordanians.

I'm not sure the spelling of her name or who she is. I will update shortly on that.

I can verify that Haruna Yukawa has been murdered.

Obviously something has seriously went wrong for the al-Furqan Media cell that was running this operation. But the video appears authentic despite the obvious difficulty al-Furqan is having.

Goto, again speaking to his family, said in the purported video released Saturday that Islamic State had changed its ransom demand and no longer wanted money.

"Their demand is easier. They are being fair. They no longer want money. So you don't need to worry about funding terrorists. They are just demanding the release of their imprisoned sister Sajida al-Rishawi," he said.

Sajida al-Rishawi is a female suicide bomber dispatched by al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack a hotel in Jordan in 2005, SITE reported. She survived when her explosive belt failed to detonate.

Al-Rishawi was arrested by Jordanian authorities at the time of the attack on the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman that killed 57 people, many of whom were at a wedding reception.

She was later shown on Jordanian tV confessing to participating in the attack, the BBC reports. Jordanian police said she was the wife of one of three Iraqi male suicide bombers involved in the assault.

"My husband wore one [bomb] belt and I another -- he told me how to use it," she said, explaining that he took one corner of the hotel and she took another.

"There was a wedding in the hotel. There were women and children," she said. "My husband executed the attack. I tried to detonate and it failed. I left. People started running and I started running with them."